The Art Of Poetry

Why do poems look or sound the way they do? Why do they make us feel or incite us to action? This module will give you practical and technical tools which deepen your ability to close read. This includes methods like scansion, rhyme and diction. We will focus on poets of the mid-20th Century, with attention to writings related to the rise, politics and after-shocks of American Confessionalism. How does such a landmark movement, whose stresses on immediacy and emotion, continue to inform our contemporary expectations of poetry and its process of creation? You will interrogate the role of the reader and the I-speaker amidst the larger questions of poetry's ethical or social consciousness.